In recent years, various electronic devices such as tablets, PDA, and smart phones have been developed. Most of such kinds of electronic devices include a touch-screen display to facilitate an input operation by the user.
The user can give instructions to the electronic device to execute a function related to a menu or object by touching the menu or object displayed on the touch-screen display by a finger or the like.
Some of such electronic devices have a function to allow the user to handwrite a character, figure or the like on the touch-screen display. Such a handwritten document (handwritten page) including characters or figures is stored and also browsed when necessary.
However, when many handwritten documents are stored, it may become difficult to retrieve a document to be browsed from the documents. Therefore, various methods for searching handwritten documents have been proposed.
In the meantime, a shape or an order of strokes of each handwritten character or figure has features for respective users. However, since the stored handwritten documents are searched by not only a user who created the documents but also the other user, there is a possibility that the features for the respective users are not used efficiently in a handwritten document search.